Our first (and hopefully last) double-header in the emergency room yesterday, a simple afternoon’s skating outing turned into the kind of catastrophe that only seems to strike my kids. There was a grand plan, driven in part by the combined effects of a two-week pizza moratorium and coverage of the Chicago Auto Show on Jalopnik, which gave me an intense craving for a deepdish pizza. I designed an entire afternoon in such a way that I would end up near the Pizzeria Uno — there would be ice skating in Troy, and while we were up there anyway, we would hop over to Latham for pizza. I even went out and got the skates sharpened in the morning so we’d be all set for wherever we ended up going in the afternoon, and after all the homework and instruments were done, we all packed up and headed to the Knickerbacker rink in Troy. Hadn’t been on the ice for two laps before Bek took a fall and landed her whole body on her arm. Lots of pain, but I wasn’t sure if it was just a hyperextension or not, so got her off the ice and out to her mom, who was conveniently with us. (I’m usually in charge of breaking them by myself.) Go back on the ice, get about another half a lap in and catch up to Hannah, who is doing a little backwards work and suddenly loses her balance and flies forward, slamming down face first. Her hands just barely broke the fall, and her head didn’t quite hit the ice, but the frames of her glasses broke and gave her a nice little laceration above the eye which, like all head wounds, bled profusely. She knew there was blood but thought it was her nose, so she was completely focused on getting her broken glasses untangled from her hair, while I was trying to get compression on the cut. Yada, yada. Luckily, we have massive first aid supplies in the truck (which was good, because the rink had only gauze), and we were pretty close to the emergency room at Samaritan, where we were also lucky enough to beat the rush. But of course, all this meant a serious delay in my pizza needs, and I was seriously jonesing by 6:30 when we finally got out of there.

So, six stitches, one broken arm, many lost endorphins, but I did end up getting my pizza, so the day wasn’t a total loss.

(So, whyizzit? The neighbor kids, who could charitably be described as “loosely parented,” can get 8 or 10 of them bouncing up and down on a rain-slick, unbalanced, safety-device free trampoline all day every day 9 months of the year, and there’s not so much as a cut lip. My kids are out on the ice for five minutes and all hell breaks loose.)